2015/08/26 by Carl L. Palmer, Rolfe Peterson · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Attractiveness #Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Misinformation #Motivated reasoning #Perception #Political communication #Political science #Politics #Psychology #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Social psychology #Survey data collection
paper · doi:10.1177/1532673x15600517
openalex publication_date 2015/08/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Physical appearance, both our own and that of others, is a common influence on social interactions. In this article, we consider whether appearance also plays a role in how we come to understand politics. As a test, we use American National Election Study survey data, which includes the interviewer’s subjective ratings of respondents’ appearance and perceived political knowledge. We bolster the ANES results with a pair of survey experiments where subjects evaluated randomly assigned potential political discussion partners. Our results show that more attractive individuals are viewed as more knowledgeable and more persuasive, and are more likely to be sought out by others for political information. In addition, more attractive individuals (even the relatively uninformed) are more likely to report attempting to persuade others. These findings have implications for our understanding of how citizens identify political experts, the potential for the spread of misinformation, and the political judgments citizens make.